I propose a film functioning as a video letter from the diaspora, in this case Miami, to family back in Haiti, in this case the Biennale audience. In this letter, the narrator attempts to bridge the spatial and temporal gap. The film makes use of epistolary structures – salutations, inquiries on health statuses, checking on unresolved business, reflections on past moments and aspirational shared future events. The film depicts diasporic space as being reshaped culturally. As an operation of memory and of migratory yearning, diasporic space becomes the site to for performing a cultural reordering. We garden, shop, commute, name places on the diasporic landscape in reflection of home.

A song played out through gritty images, a film made up by clashing sounds, a tale of solemn rhythms and casual gestures… A video installation that will be part of Alberto Danelli’s ‘Visual Poems’, this time returning to Haiti and its backdrops, wandering the city with old time friends behind and in front of the camera, seeking situations, improvising parties, digging mythologies, or highlighting potentialities and strengths. It will be a semi-conscious, often psychedelic, surely bittersweet and powerful vision of in and out Port-au-Prince.

An Tande Timoun yo is a project I am proposing to create collaboratively with some of the youth of Grand Rue. Identity, culture, and the ability to tell one’s own story are concepts that I am influenced by as an artist and educator. I believe the future of our society, culture and relevance relies on our youth and many times their voices are not heard or invited into the conversation of reimagining their communities and cities. This project would involve two components: 1) I will paint the portraits of youth in Grand Rue along with documenting their oral responses to questions about seeing themselves as change makers and shifters within their community and 2) have the youth create a work of art to be included and shown alongside their portraits in the Biennale.

Barbershops and hairs salons are one such running constant through the socially and economically diverse neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. No matter your social status, your hair will be tended. ‘Dreading Port-au-Prince’ is a multi dimensional project that aims to use places of hair-handling as point of departure to map the city. The project is subject to each viewer’s unique understanding and loosely consists of three distinct parts that may be experiences in sequential order or simultaneously. The first layer concerns direct exploring, identifying, locating, interacting and connecting with places and the people involved with them. The second is about processing material, which is ultimately hair, a shared common characteristic that is of great social and cultural significance. Hair scraps that are left at the end of the day in each place will be brought into the exhibition space and worked on daily, ultimately leading to the third and final layer. The visual translation of this project will culminate in a single, large dread, created from all the hair collected. The participating salons will be represented as nails on a wall, as accurately as possible to their relative location, and the dread will connect these points generating a non-linear map/network made out of dreaded hair.

Anna Sebastian will make a series of large scale drawings which explore the history of Port au Prince choosing locations of magical, historical and contemporary significance. They fuse fact with fiction to create a disorientating vision of their location. Anna has previously exhibited in Barcelona, Berlin and in the previous Ghettto Biennale.

This project for the fifth Ghetto Biennale takes a tri-partite approach to chart a cartography of Port-au-Prince, and Haiti more broadly, by constructing an aesthetic history of traditional Haitian medicine, its continued use, and its friction against modern pharmacological approaches to health. The first aspect of this multimedia installation will use photography to engage with the Jardin Botanique des Cayes to trace a history of herbal healing as an essential aspect of black life in colonial Saint-Domingue. In Port-au-Prince, we will bridge this historical photographic investigation with contemporary healthcare in Haiti. We will photograph the mobile pharmacies of Port-au-Prince’s streets, bridging stories of diagnosis and commercial practice with the aestheticized sculptural form these plein-air pharmacies.
Finally, this project will work collaboratively with members of Atis-Rezistans, commissioning individual sculptors to create a small number of works that respond to their own relationship with health, care, and healing.

The InPulse Art Team, comprised of Rameesh Ramsay, Tyrece Henry, Sheldon Green and Camille Chedda, will produce a series of assemblage sculptures and large charcoal drawings in response to the physical and historical landscape of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. In recent times Haiti has faced much difficulty in rebuilding after experiencing several natural disasters because of being historically compromised by waves of colonialism. The idea of ‘landscaping’ as cultural imposition emerging from this colonial history will be explored using found objects collected throughout the city, which may then interact with large charcoal drawings on paper.

Our project wonders: How do we place ourselves? M la. Nou la. I’m here. We’re here. These are common Haitian Kreyòl responses to How are you? or What’s going on? As a marker of relative wellbeing, m la and nou la indicates that the one thing people know for certain is that they exist in the here and now. The proverb Ayiti se tè glise / Haiti is a sliding land, signals a long history of the precarious uncertain relationship Haitians maintain to the literal ground, as well as to their country’s political, socioeconomic, and ecological landscapes. From a different perspective, cartography, with its troubled history of control and conquest, suggests a mode or modes of comprehending space that has been used by outsiders, colonizers, planners, and other agents of modernity to “make sense” out of chaos. Haitian writer Frankétienne said in an interview, “I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life...what I don’t like is nonmanagement of chaos.” We propose to map varied relationships to the city of Port-au-Prince through investigations in physical movement, experience, conversation, and memory. In collaboration we will negotiate the management and delight of chaos in order to elucidate something particular and wonderful about how people move through this city.

Port au Prince (PaP) exists in a state of chaotic equilibrium, where pockets of society are tightly juxtaposed to create the sprawling organism that is the city. Each of these sites (pockets) that facilitates the life of PaP acts as a point of energy, be it economic, cultural, social, spiritual and in some cases political. Each site is a Centre of Power and it is from these centres, much in the way a river flows from its headwaters to its tributaries, do the energies of PaP spread, intertwine and interact to feed the city and give it its particular essence. Using loosely the concept of totem poles our project seeks to map these centres of power. Starting from a central location (the headwaters) and radiates out into the rest of the biennial site. At each chosen centre a “totem” representing the house of power to which it belongs will be erected. This work seeks to understand both in a spatial and metaphysical sense how PaP functions and flows, and how through the establishment of space energy is transferred throughout its system.

Elena Montesinos often invites the public to take full part in her proposals. During the Ghetto Biennale 2017, The Montesinos Foundation and her accomplices will construct a huge sound system mainly composed of used recycled tires. A hanging garden will be grown on its sides as a redeveloping symbol towards the ecological crisis that Haiti is facing. The sound-system culture is known as one of the most appreciable ways to gather a large diverse crowd into unity and will generate easily accessible possibilities of sharing high quality moments all together. The opportunity to present a program consisting of local artists in conjunction with some of the biennale participants will be the essence of this sonic gathering monument. A fancy-dress parade playing around with the vegetal imagery will be launched at a forthcoming date (or during the vernissage). The sound system material will stay in Haiti afterwards and will be used by the local musicians to keep the good sound going, as it is well known that the only good system is a sound system.

The urban space of Port-au-Prince has a new and fascinating impact on traditional legends, magic, and storytelling. Canada-born, Haiti-raised visual artist Amanacer and Haitian street artist OliGa will explore the question "How do rural expressions of magical rituals, and knowledge get translated into Port-au-Prince’s urban consciousness?" This question will be explored through the creation of an interactive mural that elicits the stories around a particular magical being: the voudou mermaid goddess LaSirenn. LaSirenn's religious significance in contemporary vodou, her magic, and everyday encounters in urban consciousness of Haiti will be explored through a week-long project "LaSirenn Urbaine."

This project will consist on a research into the architecture and music of Port-au-Prince, such as the one found in its streets as its night and entertainment centers, as a way of mapping the aesthetics and sound of the city's music scene. The research will include a series of tours through the streets of Port-au-Prince and visits to nightclubs that will be documented with photography, audio and video. From the photographic records of aesthetic and architectural elements found on the research will be made a set of sculptures using these materials, textures, colors and techniques, which will be accompanied by an audio player playing a list of songs also documented in the interviews, audio and video records. As a whole it will function as a stage that invites the community of the Grand Rue and the audience attending the Biennial to have a visual and musical experience with Port-au-Prince, through an aesthetic and sonorous synthesis of this vibrant Caribbean city and of the Caribbean itself.

I symbolically want to deal with the strong cultural heritage of the distant Benin. To better understand Haiti and the wealth of its history, the occasion of a journey to Benin makes it possible to apprehend the fate of the slaves that were sent from the kingdom of Dahomey, their rites, their culture, their religion. In the continuity of the "Benkos Temple" work (see photo), where the afro-descending roots and spirits of the Caribbean coast are invoked by signs of stroboscopic luminous, enthrone on a cemetery of sound systems. It is with this kind of similar approach that I wish to question the various cultural reappropriations, whether in the form of religion, music or syncretic traditions, all very much alive in Haiti. An incredible wealth that already inspires my work and that I want to further develop. Within the framework of this project, it is also my desire to point out to the globalized and interconnected exchanges, also uprooted by a forced and acculturated dichotomy of a South American and Caribbean history tainted with blood. My pieces are meant to be both protective and reparative, aiming at participating in a collective identity reconstruction.

"ECOLE MONDIALE was originally initiated by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1902 as a postgraduate school to develop and prepare young men for a colonial career in the overseas areas of the European nation states. Filip Van Dingenen, Ive Van Bostraeten and a loose collective of artists and participants, aspires to rethink this project trough the design of 9 thematic ‘field stations’ on various locations. The aim is to redefine and investigate the feasibility of the Ecole Mondiale as a pedagogical project. In 1905, King Leopold II placed a cornerstone at Tervuren-Brussels to mark his project to build Ecole Mondiale. The classic eight departments included: Agronomy, Ethnography, History, Languages, Law, Mathematics, Medicine and Natural History. These departments were accompanied by a document centre with the expectation that its graduates would build an international knowledge centre. In particular, Leopold aimed to prepare people to explore new territories. Today, we no longer have to explore the world, but to learn how to care for our existing world.” ECOLE MONDIALE proposes to develop a Locality Grid for Port au Prince during the 5th Ghetto Biennial in Port au Prince. Whitin “EM-fieldstation TERRA (Gaiagraphy)” we adapted the notion of gridmaking into the creation of “locality grids”(LG). A locality grid is an alignment of a site-specific number of quartz crystals that is charged and permanently in earthed in a site-related form. Thereso gridmaking becomes a collaborative method to create, feel and inquire connections with the earth. Gaiagraphy & Grimaking re-applicates and reconsiders healing, care and the legacy of land-art

Continuing my approach to create links between mystic and contemporaries cultures, I will work on a project linked to the magic in Haïti and building a therapeutic installation involving locals. The goal of this piece is to mix the magical knowledge of Haïti to my personnal experiences to create a sculpture and an event specifically treating or alleviate addictions of any sorts. After talks on this subject with Haitiens, I will find the right place to install it. I would also be in contact with a spiritual representant to create under his advice and with the help of a local sculptor. Actually I dont know the size or the form of the installation, it depends on inputs I get on the spot… I often work with leds or lights and if something is possible in this way, good. If not I will find an other way.

Millions of people around the world are facing "severe" or "acute" food insecurity, and millions more are food insecure ... why keep cooking utensils at home when we absolutely nothing to put there? Through a futuristic vision Ulcer 2030 intends to go beyond the thing, by diverting the use of cooking utensils to say no to this global famine that continues to gnaw at us the stomach from year to year.

With this title I will do a performance to show what we are called, and speak with people who are dead that are living in ‘govis’ (pots that contain the spirits of the ancestors) as that is the language of Vodou. We will call Papa Dessalines to come amongst us and tell us what we should do for Haiti which seems to want to die in our hands. We will appreciate and learn about things about Haitian Voodoo and I will present it in Creole without.

My project will be a tribute poetry event/performance honoring an artist who represents Haitian art and literature. On the 20th anniversary of death of poet Felix Morisseau Leroy, I propose to celebrate his life and work with a performance of his poetry by local artists who will participate in the Ghetto Biennale. Felix Morisseau Leroy, though born near Jacmel, moved to Port au Prince as a young man. In Haiti's capital city he taught literature and theater, and worked as a writer and journalist. It was in Port au Prince where Moriso, as he is known in Kreyol, formed his belief that the Kreyol of the streets could be used to unite Haiti. He spent his life establishing the legitimacy of the Kreyol language for creative use in literature and culture.

Giuseppe De Angelis and Michael Radford will photograph the former sites which boomed the system in Haiti which enslaved 100s of thousands of Africans. Using a view camera, the same method of photography which was used shortly after the revolution, creating a visual map, including plantations, sugar refineries, as well as the port where the slaves arrived and produce was exported out to Europe and America. These landscapes will be juxtaposed with portraits of people taken in a pop-up studio in and around Port-au-Prince, the first city to be incorporated under French colonial rule in 1704. The works will be a collaborative process with the locals, giving both a foreign and local view, which will stem from a series of photography workshops which the artists will run throughout the biennale.

Using the by-product of the local wood turners, the sawdust, I want to create a comfortable local public toilet that will not be dependent on any municipal urban sewage infrastructure to create a contemplative spiritual sanctuary.

In other words you can't polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter.

As the curators of the exhibition ENERGY FLASH in Antwerp (Belgium) claimed in their press release in 2016 „Rave culture from the 1980s and 1990s was Europe’s last big youth movement. During this period of radical social and political change, rave (…) migrated around the continent from its epicentre of Great Britain, Belgium and Germany. As a movement, it enacted a desire to be autonomous, with a belief in tolerance and experimental living, all built around the latent energy of electronic music.“ This exhibition, institutionalizing rave in a museum context, did not only name it the last big collective youth move in Europe, but somehow also declared it over. With an average age of over 40 in Europe this might not only be a bold curatorial claim but a matter of fact. In Haiti the average age is around 21 years, making it one of the youngest societies on the planet, implicating a concentration of dreams, ideas and energy. The future of the ideals of the rave movement doesn’t lie in old Europe, but in the hands of the up-and-coming Power Generation. The project results in a conference focused on the past Ghetto Biennale themes as well as youth manifestos.

The arts of the Caribbean people echoes fundamental layers. Quimbambaras focuses on consistent cultural material found in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Cuba, called vudu dolls. These figures made out of rags and colorful fabrics are found in botanicas, stores that sell all types of products for spiritual works. Vudu dolls are called as such for they are meant to represent spiritual guides, protectors, and warriors. Black rag dolls are dressed in styles and with fabrics that relate to the XIX century madamas. Black women with strong character who claimed forces by spiritual practices and ancestral magical-religious rituals. Made by women this dolls represent the evolution of African cultural artistic practices with textiles, a symbolic element of spiritual power. Is there a prototype of the dolls and does it have a presence in Haitian cultural religious rituals? So close and yet so far away, the differences in cultural expressions in the region challenges preconceive definitions and concepts. The vudu dolls project will map workshops dealing with vudu aesthetics and will elaborate in the creation of a population of vudu dolls in human and large scale. They will inhabit the Villa Vudu. A spiritual healing center.

Tanbou Maps uses the sacred drums of vodou, the marching rhythm of rara, and the incessant hooks of konpa to create a sonic map of Port-Au-Prince, revealing the city’s global history of colonialism, transcontinental migration and indigeneity, and platforming Haiti’s contribution to the international music scene. Over the course of the Biennale, I will conduct (with a translator) interviews, oral histories, and field recordings with drummers, drum-makers, and rhythmic practitioners around Port-Au-Prince and the countryside. These encounters, and the geographic histories they reveal, will form a rhizomatic map documenting Haitian rhythm and its influences. Alongside these audio recordings, I will work with a Haitian painter, Syndia Leonce, to create an experimental visual map with Port-Au-Prince at its center.

feedback buster ghetto blaster is a collaborative project investigating the complex and insanely intense soundscape of the city of Port au Prince, developed as a joint venture between Jan Moss and Sanba Zao, a multi instrumentalist musician and a teacher of traditional drumming based in Port au Prince. Chants of the praying, shouts of the street vendors, engines roaring, laughing, honking, and omnipresent loud music – sharp sounds seem to fill in literally every corner of the city. On the other hand, throughout the ages the traditional drumming has organized various aspects of everyday life of the people of Haiti: from labor, to entertainment, to rituals within religious ceremonies. The project will have a closer look (closer listen?) at both dimensions of the sonosphere, set up a feedback loop that would act like a mirror to the ears of the people of Port au Prince, and play the sounds of the city back to the city.

I am Jean Daniel, a sculptor and with the project HAITI (MAP) ART I wil present a sculpture which is also a painting with three aspects and in three different materials. This will be exhibited in Lakou Rezistans.

The project will include two sculptures that I make with recycled materials. In Haiti, Baron is the general law of the cemetery. He has all the spiritual power that mankind can imagine. The name of the Baron are still cited in Haitian families that practice Vodou. This project aims to wake up the awareness of people of power. Through this I hope that people who may have the power to reflect on a spiritual themes and the politics to be more aware of zonbification and modern slavery.

I am presenting two big paintings which can on one hand show how this area was a very beautiful life and very beautiful environment, and the other painting will show you how this zone has fallen down bleeding with negligence. I will show how Port-au-Prince stopped being the city of princes and has fallen down hemorrhaging its health and culture.

Documentary production and screening. We want to look at Port-au-Prince from the perspective of the free-ranging goats of the city cemetery. We will attach a GoPro camera to a goat and take it for a walk. Later we will combine the resulting footage with a narration. A rough cut of the piece will be screened on December 16 at the Ghetto Biennale site.

My project will be to take all the artists on a day trip to Arcahaie, where I was born. This is a beautiful town on the Western coast where the Haitian flag was created by Catherine Flon and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The town is very important historically and has a number of monuments.

Jim Ricks (Irish/Americana) will collaborate with local residents in workshops to collect, combine, and create symbols and signs that reflect their daily life and aspirations. These will be further refined and made into small banners in the tradition of Drapo Vodou, embroidered and decorated with beads and sequins, and be activated via parade and display. This process of public engagement, as well as hybridising the traditional with the contemporary is a common theme in Ricks's work, as he aims to reveal new, albeit sometimes absurd, 'truths' about a place.

At this year’s Ghetto Biennale, I will direct a musical event in Gran Ru. During the last two biennales, I have created purely visual works. Amongst a variety of in inspirations, the decision to create something sonic reflects a major shift in my practice from art to music. As well as this, and more importantly, the one phenomenon that has left me increasingly moved each time I’ve travelled to Port- au-Prince is music. In the city it’s everywhere and it’s diverse, and in its omnipresence it leaks into visual culture; from paintings of musicians on busses, to vast handmade sound systems. Perhaps this is an easy thing to say for visitor to a country poorer than his own, but Port-au-Prince seems to me utterly rhythmic. In its informality and its anarchy, rhythm is present. Whether those rhythms are causes or products of the city’s complex infrastructure, I feel them as necessary to its vitality. Cringingly, it is often said by visitors like myself to cities similar to PAP that there’s something musical about its chaos; and of course this is often a lazy and meaningless remark, a bit like when visitors to Brixton describe it as colourful. Yet, the vast and distinct range of genres native to Haiti; the looseness of people’s bodies and they’re resultant ability to dance; the processions of Rara bands; the blaring speakers of public busses; the relentless pulse of voodoo ceremonies; the hisses of hailing for publiks; the sounds of twoubadou bands from clubs; choirs from open-air churches early on Sunday morning; and of course the traffic — I find it hard not to think of the sum of these qualities as a deep, challenging rhythm. All of these aspects, and so many more, compose a city that’s complex and difficult and so very alive. Navigating it is impossible without engaging whole-heartedly with its fluid, inconsistent musicality.

Commerce runs through Port-au-Prince in every direction. It's possible to orient oneself in the city by street market, and often the only necessity when giving directions is to name the closest one; Mache Delmas, Mache Kwabosal, Mache Salomon. In Kreyol, mache means market, but also walk and function.
Market vendors use a wide range of techniques to draw the attention of passers-by, creating elaborate displays, precarious or precise mounds and piles of all kinds of goods. I think of these displays as sculpture, and traverse the city with an endless grocery list in order to recreate and image them in a range of ad-hoc studios (unoccupied apartments, abandoned buildings, my hotel room), using an 8x10 camera and existing or reflected light.

Space and time are the universal and absolute constraints on human life. Haiti is a country that lives and does business in the streets and public spaces. In this context who can claim space and resources, and how is the intersection between private and public space administered? “Location, location, location” matters to the Haitian street vendor too. No matter how well built or spacious, a market a hundred and fifty meters from a major intersection doesn't offer nearly the advantages of three feet of sidewalk at the busy corner. I intend to build on photographic work I did in Port-au-Prince in the 2007-2010 time frame, updating and deepening my inquiry into the distribution of the resource of public space, documenting its use photographically and captioning my photos with interviews concerning the history and theory of peoples' claims to it, cross-referencing the direct experience of people on the street with academic work on markets and geographic analysis. I aim to make works of art that stand on their own, but also act as universally accessible documents of conditions on the street and in the lives of Haitians.

Lazaros, in collaboration with the Historical Society of Deseret, will publish a rare out of print tour guide to the telluric currents of Port-au-Prince, originally set forth by the society in 1991. The artist manages the organization’s collection of artifacts in Wendover Utah as well as their documents archive, and has previously republished other works by HSD such as A Historical Tour of The Kingdom of Deseret, Volume III (1997), and A Tour of The Doheny Estate (1989). The Tour of The Telluric Currents of Port-au-Prince traces the magnetic fields below the ground of the city and points out architectural and city structures that align with these energy lines. The book explores known illuminati ritual gathering sites, government buildings, mystical portals, and other edifices which draw upon the power of the lay lines of Port-au-Prince.

Continuing the garden collaboration established in Lakou Claude during the 4th Ghetto Biennial, we are setting up a Seed Library and Sensorium. The idea of a Seed Library is to freely offer seeds to community members, who grow out the plants, then return seeds to the library so that they may distributed again. Using the seed library as a center point, we will map out pollinator pathways, and augment their nourishment through planting edible trees, medicinal plants and nutrient dense culinary herbs through the broader areas of the Grand Rue. The Sensorium will consist of educational material on native pollinators and plant cycles for local students. Initiating a community knowledge base, we will invite people to share what they know about the plants that have seeds included in the library. In so doing, we can help maintain the rich and historical connection to Haitian agricultural heritage.

Mosaik pou La Ville is a site-specific installation that will draw on Haiti’s deep historical and cultural roots to present a vision of Haiti’s capital city with an eye toward the future. All the while bringing together members of the community and artists of different backgrounds. The implementation of the project is intended to be an interactive and educational process whereby anyone who is interested in participating, learning about mosaic, etc. is invited to join and locals will be encouraged. By allowing anyone and inviting everyone to participate in the process, MPLV draws on Haiti’s history of communal participation. Haitian history is full of examples of this that range from the Haitian revolution itself (which established independence) to the Konbit (a system of communal agriculture still used in parts of the country).

I will design t-shirts for this project which will represent monuments that our ancestors left for us (like Labadi, the Citadelle, Palais San Souci). I will do some beautiful designs on the t-shirts and think this will interest many people.

This proposal is for a multilayered work consisting of a series of workshops, performances, a feature film and a play - all to be performed and filmed in the city of Port-au-Prince during the Ghetto Bienniale 2017. The work will be largely collaborative, featuring a group of 8 young Haitian actors, poets and slammers - with whom I shall work with alongside my producer and collaborator Olivier Marboeuf. Taking as a point of departure the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, this project seeks to create a translation both in language and temporality of an important work of fiction about Haitian history. The play is about the last days in the life of Toussaint Louverture, set in his castle prison cell in France, featuring scenes from revolutionary Haiti that exist within the memories of Louverture. However, as with much of the way Haiti is often conceptualized at a distance, the play is written in French and therefore poses a problem within the context of Haiti itself, raising questions about the hegemonic structures of class control within a (neo)colonial society.

Figures of Interruption is a cartography of religious architectures of syncretism written in juxtaposition to the influx of migrations that interrupt- extend, dissociate and re-narrativize- the histories of this artistic space. In particular, this ethnographic incursion seeks to convey through a mapping of artistic objects, played against drawings of edifices extending from an arranged placement of objects on the street or in the dirt, the ways in which stakeholders of the Haiti Ghetto Biennale have altered the landscape of artistic practice, narrative and movement into and from the space of the Grand Rue. This mapping of relationship between object, person and place, parallels, in some ways the trajectory of religious syncretism as the building of a form of institutionalism that is both public and private, formal and informal. The work of mapping involves not only artistic object resting upon a linear mapping with chalk, charcoal, salt, graphite and Vodou powders but the mapping of speech patterns gleaned via interviews, into a typographic and linear storytelling- a kind of visual speech map.

Guided by Sound: A Port-au-Prince Sound Map aims to reveal and share the polyphonic flourishes Port-au-Prince holds. Guided by Sound will be a series of field recordings recorded throughout the day and night over a 3-week period. Field recordings may be made from, but not limited to: bus rides, venders calling out their goods, children running through the curve and maze of homes in the neighborhood, grinding voodoo pigments, cracking open coconuts, puddles, the ocean, music, vibrations of buildings, people greeting one another, sunrise, night breezes…A Port-au-Prince sound map is an evocative and effective way of presenting sound and place together that can be visceral, humorous, collective yet simultaneously private as sounds trigger memory, scent, site and people. Additionally, a Port-au-Prince sound map is one without borders as well as accessible to the neighborhoods community members who do not read.

The history of Port-au-Prince contains many variations of culture, but Vodou is another history with a lot of mystery. My project, the mapping of spirits, explores this: this will be a manner for me to share with artists from Haiti and abroad the type of spirit which manifests itself in their head whenever they are exercising their talents. Then I will represent my deeds within my work which I am going to exhibit.

The cartographic framework will allow me to use the pepè (second-hand clothes mainly from the United States) and other composite materials, to be able to establish a selective topography of the Haitian aesthetic and cultural landscape. This monumental work will be exposed suspended vertically by an urban facade. The venue will be selected with the advice of artists, curators and other inhabitants of Port-au-Prince, including the artist, curator and author Claudel Casseus, with whom I will collaborate.

The memory of a great Port-au-Prince still draws in everybody's mind and for history. Today Haitian people always wonder to themselves what's happened with the city? Back in the days, under the policy of Duvalier Port-au-Prince was beautiful, strangers used to come and especially they liked Bicentenaire. Back then trains ran, artistic things happened and people used to enjoy socialising. In another part of the city there is Cité Solèy, do you see it now? It wasn't always like that, it was once a paradise. My urban performance with a singer and drummer will examine 'what's happened with the city'. The drum a critical component to my message as every beating means something specifically.

For the ghetto biennale, I would present a new piece of my work MAPS, a series of hand-woven textiles, each made with used bullet casings collected in a specific location. Most bullet casings are marked with their country of origin and/or manufacturer’s code, and can hence be used (and often are the only evidence available) to trace international arms trafficking routes, behind-the-scenes diplomacy and secret military interventions. Somewhere between forensics, archaeology and political cartography, this work traces the origin of the ammunition found in different countries to map recent military conflicts, international gun trade routes or in the case of the US, its domestic manufacturing industry and the forces behind its enormous gun demand.

I refer to this proverb as I want to talk about Port-au-Prince without hiding anything and without lying. I am going to work on a mapping of the city which will characterise Port-au-Prince and explain to everyone around this work, what I mean is that I will explain to Haitians and visitors all the aspects of Port-au-Prince that occur in my work.

A critical component of the visual landscape of Port-au-Prince is the abundance of what might in the hipster enclaves of the global North be described as “artisanal advertising.” The widespread and continued use of hand-painted signage to promote shops, borlette, barbershops, medical services and every manner of small business imposes a vibrant aesthetic of astonishing diversity on the city. Street graphics decorate every corner of the metropolis and are essential components of the Port-au-Prince experience. Little considered, especially perhaps by the North-American visitor accustomed to the stultifying conformity of mass-produced corporate branding, is that behind every example of such signage, whether sophisticated or crude, is the hand of an artist. “Grafik Popile Potoprins,” a project on the topography of the popular graphic arts in the city, continues research and documentation I have already begun on the hand-painting of hair salons and barbershops in Haiti, but approaches the subject through a psycho-geographic lens, considering questions I have not posed before in my work: Are the creators of popular graphics centralized, living in near-enclaves in the same way as many other producers of Haitian artistic material? (One thinks of the papier-maché artisans of Jacmel, the iron-cutters and stampers of Noailles, and even of the postmodern
example set by the Grand Rue community itself.) If so, how did these impromptu centers originate? If not, what are the mechanisms by which artists emerge, find employment, credibility and even fame in the greater city? How important is “neighborhoodness” in the production and dissemination of popular graphic art?

Those children, who don’t have ready made toys and board games, know dozens of games, which didn’t need plaything, maximum that they can create themselves. Among adults, playing games is a peaceful meeting point of different habits, characters, the best way to build communities.
My plan is to collecet games that are known and used in the community of ghetto of Port au Prince, that I put together in a big book of Haitian games, illustrated with drawings and photos.
The other part of my programme is to establish a corner of games, where Haitian and international participants of Ghetto Biennale can play different games together. This corner could be the site of creating a special Haitian chess set, together with young ghetto artists, using local materials and methods.

My project for the next Ghetto Biennale is to make an installation around tech as I study this at the Haiti Tec. This will be based around TÉLÉCOMMUNICATIONS where I will detail many important things in this technical field. I would like to work with some visiting artists so we can make a visual demonstration in Andre Eugene's yard.

“Potre” is a relief printmaking and curatorial project by Chicago-based artist and curator Sabrina Greig. The project will teach an introductory relief printmaking workshop to local Haitian students affiliated with the non-profit literacy program, Haiti Reads. Through classes centered on portraiture and self-representation, students will create portraits of themselves through relief printmaking and collage techniques as a method of emancipation and radical self-love. In line with the Ghetto Biennial’s theme “Cartography of Port-au-Prince,” students will be invited to decorate their self-portraits with a diverse of assortment of printed matter—from maps to paper—resulting in a multimedia cartographic collage. The final prints will be curated and exhibited at the Ghetto Biennial in with the intention of changing the narrative surrounding global perceptions of the city and citizens of Port-au-Prince.

My current body of work focuses on how people of the African Diaspora currently and have historically engaged with the sea. I am interested in exploring how a collective unconscious memory of the sea – through the lens of the Transatlantic Slave trade – may inform the relationship people of the Caribbean have with the sea. Unique sets of circumstances across the Americas awaited survivors of the journey in their new land. I am interested in how historical, cultural and socio-economic circumstances in Haiti have rippled into how Haitians engage with the sea and how that engagement may evolve in the future. For the Biennial I propose to make 3 dioramas inspired by Haitian culture as it relates to the sea – past, present and future. The diorama originated as a French picture viewing device – developed in Paris around the same time Haiti gained its independence. This take on the diorama will be made of found materials – natural and man-made, primarily sourced from the sea and the beaches in and around Port Au Prince.

The 'Publis Haïti' project is a five-part installation, resulting of two weeks of work with the group Timoun Rezistans. It is proposing to connect five cultural production centres in the city of Port-au-Prince with illuminated signs that communicate with and echo each other in the form of five words written in red LED lights and mounted on façades. The installation works like an advertisement that, rather than being used in a traditional way, is a promotion of art and poetry. Followed by a question mark, the words, written in Creole and short enough to work as a slogan, directly address passers-by and forge a connection with the public. Highly visible and all comprising LEDs of the same colour, the signs form a whole despite being scattered around various parts of the city.

This project is supported by the Ville de Lausanne/Fonds des Arts Plastiques.

For our “Museum Of The Future” project, we propose a series of photographs documenting the scenarios envisioned by local authors in our science fiction / speculative fiction anthology, Port-au-Prince 2060. For each story, we will scout out a suitable location and then set the scene by adding in technology and costumed models. Where possible, we will install explanatory placards (“In this spot, in the year 2060, X happened…) that invite passerby to reflect on what things may come to pass in each location.

“Free Lens” is a low-production nighttime infrared flash photography project. Tom Bogaert will use a modified night vision security camera in an attempt to capture the essence of Port-au-Prince by night outside the lens-free zone. The resulting digital images will be printed in a local copy shop and will be added to the project in the format of a continuously growing offline archive.

“Traces of Taino” is an attempt to identify glimpses of the Taino Culture hidden around us, and to understand how much of this culture is still present in everyday life in Haiti. Before the African slaves were forced on the island, the Tainos were the indigenous population that inhabited Qusikeya (modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic). However, their fate turned ill immediately after Colombus’s arrival to the island in 1492, and the majority of the natives fled the island or died. In present day culture, Haiti’s strong connection with their African ancestors can be seen through music, culture. religion, ect., but just how connected are Haitians to their Taino Roots? Through dialogues with local communities, spiritual leaders, hougans & mambos, the artists will attempt to understand what happened to the Taino culture, and will create an art installation piece that links the two cultures- African and Taino together using a medicine wheel made up of various objects collected throughout Port Au Prince. The installation will be designed by Haitian-American artist Valerie Noisette and Guadeloupian artist Thierry Alet, in collaboration with local Haitian artists from Bel Air.

For my project I will buy some Bobèch lamps in order to light them for Haiti.I will install them in the Atis Rezistans lakou. And it will be interesting for other people to join with me to light these lamps in each corner to pray that Haiti will not perish.

The quantity and variety of visual information that fills the streets of Port-au-Prince provides ample resources for pedestrians to navigate this environment. As people move through these spaces, how does this mobility-- our origins, routes, intersections and destinations-- impact the aesthetics of our surroundings? This project will highlight the human element within the urban landscape by reimagining recognizable features of the everyday street view as wearable objects. Alongside local creatives and trendsetters, I will design and construct a unique collection of fashion-forward wearables that infuse current sartorial trends with the spirit of physical locations around the city. This process will explore how we might represent the places we hang our hats on the hats themselves, or collect the souvenirs of our movements on our belts rather than under them. The STREETVIEW collection will be presented as a community costume closet, inviting participants to mix, match, style, strut, and pose however they choose. This interactive project will encourage wearers to explore the transformative power that emerges at the crossroads. What happens when we wear our art on our sleeve, walk a mile in shoes made of tires, or view the world through sequin-tinted glasses?